


odd diversity of misery and joy

by sictransitgloriamundi



Series: from the desk of Courier Six, representative of the Sovereign City of New Vegas [1]
Category: Fallout: New Vegas, Il buono il brutto il cattivo | The Good The Bad and The Ugly (1966)
Genre: Colleagues to Lovers, M/M, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, all companions are here but not all of them have lines
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-21
Updated: 2019-04-22
Packaged: 2020-01-23 07:04:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,715
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18544732
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sictransitgloriamundi/pseuds/sictransitgloriamundi
Summary: There were a few issues with the Legion safehouse Six sent them to clear out.One, the only things to read were a poor copy of The Conquest of Gaul and a bad translation of The Odyssey, both of which Angel Eyes had already read.Two (a), bedraggled Legionnaires kept dragging themselves out of the Colorado and crawling up to the safehouse, where they had to be put down.Two (b), there really wasn’t a good place to dispose of the bodies that werei) out of line of sight of the safehouseii) out of the ghoul-creating high-rad pockets of the old testing grounds at their back and Searchlight to their west.Three, the brief relief offered by the Second Battle of Hoover Dam had settled back into a bone-deep foreboding.Four, Blondie’s mood had worsened exponentially.Five, there was only one functional bed.





	1. you cannot sleep when enemies are nearby

The day after the Second Battle for Hoover Dam, five exhausted people and a cyborg dog dragged themselves downstairs to the lobby of the dead Mr House’s big dead hotel.

The Courier threw a rum & Nuka-Cola at Blondie and tried to pop open a key on the edge of a pool table. Frowning, she chucked the key in Angel Eyes’ general direction and fumbled open a new bottle. “The Followers’ safehouse, up by Jacobstown and one-five-seven. Go. Sleep. You deserve it. I don’t plan on getting up for a month of Sundays.”

The gentle rumble of Dr. Arcade Gannon lurching down fifteen flights of stairs came to a boiling roar, the stairwell door bounced open, Arcade bounced off Blondie, and immediately started yelling. “Six, alcohol is a blood thinner and you are STILL ACTIVELY BLEEDING-”

“Fuck off, Doc.” she said without a trace of venom, and pointed waveringly at the three men as she limped back into the elevator, leaning on Veronica’s unbandaged shoulder and Christine with a gentle hand on her back.

“You two- don’t let my dog out, I don't want any more fucking dead mole rats gumming up th-” and the elevator cheerfully went BING! and rumbled its unsettling way upstairs.

“ _Caveat Samaritanus_ ,” Arcade told the ceiling.

Blondie knew Angel Eyes just well enough to tell the difference between going perfectly still before lining up a shot and going perfectly still before he decided which way to break in a bad situation. It was the latter this time as Blondie stopped Rex from ducking out the door into the broiling midday, one leg across the dog’s metal chest. They stalemated there for a moment, man and dog, until Arcade stopped frowning at the ceiling and whistled Rex to a rat that had tried to go unnoticed behind the check-in desk.

Blondie noted that Angel Eyes was still standing solidly, determinedly, on top of the secret hatch, where the pattern didn’t quite align with the carpet and there was still a bullet graze.

He knocked back the mostly-rum-with-a-hint-of-soda and remembered.

* * *

 

Blondie had been on some weird fucking jobs for the nigh-omniscient Mr House, technocrat ruler of New Vegas, but picking up his final payment at this beautiful corpse of a dead casino was about an inch from a hard limit. For a few dollars less, he’d cut his losses and vanish north again.

Surely there were other, easier, less perilous ways to make a living.

Tracking a tiny foolhardy Courier to an alien abduction site with Angel Eyes, the most irritating mercenary in New Vegas had already washed his hands of working for House. Neither of them were particularly excited about informing him that they were terminating their agreement and she was vanished? vaporized? certainly dead after that great shock of electricity arcing up and over the desert, so the scenic route back to civilization it was.

Angel Eyes had gotten under his skin and stayed there until he started to accept it, even come to welcome the barbed banter and sardonic sniping on the long walk home. He could do without Angel Eye’s bad habit of ghosting uncomfortably near the very tail of his peripheral vision, even the whole silent way into the decaying Lucky 38.

When the same tiny woman now covered in blood popped out of a hatch in the hotel lobby floor he hadn’t known existed, Blondie’s boot knife was already in his hand. Angel Eyes almost shot her with his tiny stupid holdout pistol out of pure reflex.  

“Oh, it’s you two,” she said, peering up and around at them from behind the carpet-covered circle. She wiped her hair back, peering at her Pip-Boy through the blood on the screen, ineffectually trying to clear it with a corner of an equally bloodsoaked bandanna.

She hawked up something impressively disgusting to clear her throat, and upended his life. “House is dead. You work for me now. Know anything about elevators? My robot dog won’t go down the stairs.”

* * *

And now, after a series of increasingly bizarre but well-paid jobs, culminating in an all-out war for this corner of desert, they were awarded a...break? vacation? of sorts at this hidden concrete block, quiet as a grave.

Angel Eyes appreciated the empty mountainside, since it seemed like every time they came back to the Lucky 38 between jobs it got rowdier.

The ever-increasing cast that floated in and out of the casino, in order of most to least dangerous:

  1. ED-E, a weird little floating robot that only Six could understand, but despite the obvious safety concerns had upgraded so it could vaporize a cazador at fifty paces and seriously maim a man at half that. Distressing. Unstable.  
  2. Christine, the more diplomatic girlfriend whose Old World actress voice didn’t quite match her scarred face. As frighteningly competent as Six but more apt to snipe from afar instead of blasting her way through with a shotgun in each hand.
  3. Raul, who pretended to be a quiet mechanic and kept his secrets to himself but who Angel Eyes strongly suspected to be the infamous “Ghost of Mexico City”.
  4. Cass, an impressively foul-mouthed merchant just as in love with mid-range weapons as Six and about the same sense of self-preservation.  
  5. Veronica, the less diplomatic girlfriend who could and would punch anything.
  6. Boone, ex-NCR sniper who was too depressed to really be a threat most of the time as long as you stayed close-range and kept him drunk.
  7. Lily, some sort of supermutant grandmother (?).  
  8. Rex, an unsettling cyborg dog with a see-through skull, surely not how God intended dog brains to work, thankfully cannot operate a gun.  
  9. Dr Arcade Gannon, a pretty face and a good sawbones. Absolutely no sense of range or how to group his shots.  



A week and a day after the Dam, and two days after Blondie barely missed some young idiot heading toward the safehouse with purpose, Six appeared at the bottom of the decaying onramp and hollered “The Followers want their safehouse back!”

She wheezed up the slope with one hand on her still-bandaged ribs, followed by Rex and ED-E burbling along happily behind her.   

“Can’t believe they can’t give me one goddamn thing, it’s not like keeping Arcade out of trouble is EASY, Julie-I’m-The-Head-Of-Everything-In-Freeside-Now-Farkas,” she growled, and wiggled an absolutely filthy bandanna out from under her Pip-Boy.

“Deserter!” she yelled after Rex, bounding off after a bighorner, yapping his fool head off and followed by an excitedly beeping EDE.

She sighed and unrolled the bandanna over a rock with a theatrical flick, where it laid like a occult tablecloth over the sunbaked macadam.

“Used to be the best map in the Mojave, boys. And then I gained two to the head and one to the wrist. Do wish it would come off sometimes though.” she muttered, using a scraggly handful of grass to itch under her reddened wrist.

Lining up the Pip-Boy’s tiny scrolling map with her own rusty red pinprick markings, she frowned over the southwest corner of the map.

“You know where you followed me and the, uh, thing happened? The glowy beam thing?” she asked without looking up.

Blondie and Angel Eyes frowned at each other over her head.

Which one of them had tipped her off?

Certainly his creaky old joints, Blondie’s stare said.

Certainly his flamboyant poncho, Angel Eye’s stare said.

“Off whatever that road is that connects Nipton with eye one-five and nine-five? Hey, why _were_ you following me and Veronica?” she asked while trying to read her own handwriting.

“Persuasion.”

“Care to elaborate?”

“Didn’t think you understood the “necessity of keeping to a schedule.” Thought you needed some “persuasion to see a different, more timely worldview.”,” Blondie quoted.  

“What a pretentious dick. Best kill I ever made. Oh! Here it is. Legion safehouse-make sure it’s all cleared out. And swing by the river a few times. Get rid of any flotsam and jetsam.”

“Might I request a more scenic and peaceful locale?” requested Angel Eyes.

“Nope!” she said cheerfully. “Only the desert for you.”

“Don’t know why I didn’t mark this on the Pip, not like I had anything better to do that night than freeze my tail off that on stupid roof,” she continued, frowning at her Pip-Boy.

She whipped around, nearly clocking Angel in the jaw.

“OH! Blondie, your poncho! Thank you- and sorry about the bloodstains, I think Arcade got the worst of them out, and it’s all of one piece now, I sewed up the bulletholes?”

She dug out his faded green and beige poncho from her messenger bag, and for a moment- something in the drape over her arm, a certain fold that caught the light just so- he saw her bleeding all over it again, Arcade running an IV into the Hero of the Second Battle of Hoover Dam’s arm as Veronica and Christine and Blondie and Angel Eyes and Cassidy and Boone and Raul and ED-E and Rex all poured into the Hoover Dam Visitor Center and laid her out on the information desk, side shredded by the Monster of the East’s giant stupid uncivilized sword.

This was only after she’d pried open one baleful, bloodshot eye and told Veronica to throw that NCR general off the dam, and told Christine she was in charge of telling the Mojave New Vegas was unfuckable.

Woman had her priorities straight.

He caught Angel Eyes starting to turn toward him with an unreadable from the corner of one’s eye look on his face, and hastily pulled the poncho over his head. He held out his arms for inspection and did an ironic little spin in place.

Present, whole, not bleeding out Six picked at something invisible in the crook of her elbow.

“It’s a look.” she said politely.

Blondie narrowed his eyes at her.

“You’re not only gonna catch another bullet in the head, you’re gonna catch a cold.” he muttered at her long sleeveless Courier’s vest.

“At least I don’t look like a walking bedspread.” she sniffed, turning her nose up dramatically towards the equally pitiless sun.

Rex slunk back, whining all the way.

“What is it, boy, has Timmy fallen down a well?” she joked, and he pricked up his ears on either side of his unsettling brain and dopplered off to the west.

“Fucking robot dog and his fucking stupid new brain,” she groused, and went huffing back down the onramp and slid down a fallen mile marker off the embankment without a goodbye, as if she knew with absolute certainty they didn't have anything better to do than her mission in this weird limbo of after-battle tension.

“Good thing that woman has a solid payment history,” Angel Eyes muttered, looking irritated he hadn’t gotten to argue with her about the exact payment.

“The long slow way,” Blondie mused over the gently fluttering map, finger smoothing over the four-leaf-clover loop of the 188 trading post, “or the tight squeeze?” tracing over the little deathclaw glyph on the other side of the mountains.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> happy Easter here's some background so I can yell about gay cowboy pining in a series of elaborate flashbacks.  
> The title is from Dinah Washington's Mad About the Boy, sung by Helen Forrest on the in-game radio.  
> The first thing I max out on any RPG character is speech so I can get Max Content/Dialogue Options, which explains why my Six is Like That. My Six is also fully upgraded with all the Old World Blues and Medical Clinic upgrades, so I feel like her cheerfully bouncing around after about ten days is reasonable. Also- consider- Arcade basically pumped her full of Med-X before the battle and essentially replaced her blood with stimpacks afterwards. This Courier also immediately shut down all the Securitrons after the battle, because having a non-sentient security force running around worries me as a player and I think it's much funnier if Veronica throws Oliver off the dam instead of Yes Man.  
> I don’t really know what errands she sent them on- probably a lot of cleaning up the Fiends and cleaning out pockets of ghouls? I do wish there were options to recruit the Powder Gangers and Fiends to be on your side/work on getting them reintegrated into society if you’re on NCR, or just using them as cannon fodder in the Dam battle if you’re Legion? It feels like there’s enough people and feral ghouls to shoot if you side with one or the other anyway but this is a high level critique of a very old game.  
> I am OBSESSED with the map-outlined-in-your-own-blood thing since I saw it in Mad Max. I don’t know if that’s a canon thing or something I’ve picked up from the fandom, but it’s here now also.  
> A note- my Courier did all the DLC and almost all the sidequests before the Dam, so that’s why they’ve been keeping tabs on her so long but lost her entirely twice- once was Dead Money and the other was Old World Blues.  
> "Only the desert for you." is from Lawrence of Arabia (1962, dir David Lean).  
> https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Jimmy%27s_well


	2. you cannot carry any more of item [feelings]

They methodically cleared almost everything of use out of the safehouse and went the dangerous way, and tried to hide to each other the disappointing fact that it was less dangerous than it used to be.

Not just because the most dangerous game, the Fiends, were largely gone, taken out by Six and her headlong assault on Vault 3, but the deathclaw nest in the quarry was also blown to smithereens. They heard all about how she sat on top of a crane for six hours in the dead noon and sniped them down from an incredibly enthusiastic gang of miners.

They didn’t even get to kill a deathclaw other than in omlette form on this trip from the cook at the quarry who was extremely cagey about where she acquired the eggs, and it would be inaccurate to say they pouted about it but they definitely frowned.

Blondie had a number of thoughts he kept to himself, strangely abstracted on the way south.

Angel Eyes had many, and a sort of begrudging professional respect towards Six, theoretically well out of earshot. The woman’s sheer grit had certainly eliminated a number of personal irritants, but there simply wasn’t any zest to travel any more.

There weren’t even any more roving bands of loose convicts, just the nauseatingly wholesome Goodsprings and Primm. Six had freed one former convict because she needed him for another mysterious mission and killed the rest in another assault on the old NCR prison camp.  All merely because they bothered her on that vengeful drive north toward the Tops and that slimy fucker Benny who left her for dead.

Angel Eyes couldn't imagine how she picked one out of that nest of idiots. She was too smart for it to be merely random, and he hadn’t heard about the man since so that meant he either must have done a good job and gotten to live out a quiet rest of his life unbothered by short invincible Couriers, or he died in the attempt and she sent someone else he’d never heard of.

Maybe they were the replacements for that early mission, he thought, and noted the thrill up his spine with a clinical detachment.

She wasn’t as close with him or Blondie as the rest of her merry band, and that was fine with him.

It didn’t do to get too friendly with anyone in the Mojave. Angel Eyes had suspected for a long time that House had only thrown them together because he was running out of options (options (plural, n): people with a very specific skill set you can buy or threaten with losing their housing in New Vegas proper under a very limited timeframe).

Six seemed to have a million friends and allies, and comparatively more options regarding people who owed her favors, but he did prefer the missions Six sent them on to the complex ones House did. Knowing you’re a loose cannon being pointed at problems that don’t require a lot of diplomacy was freeing, in a way.

* * *

 

The Legion safehouse had a gigantic, ancient combination lock. Blondie started fiddling with it in interest before Angel Eyes shouldered him out of the way and shot it point-blank with a plasma pistol, sending slag spattering all over the door and their boots.

They had a calm and reasoned discussion about how everyone who walked by would know someone broke in, versus the merits of getting indoors sometime this week, versus the fact it was a four-number lock and cycling through a thousand numbers would take a few hours at most.

There were a few more problems with the safehouse, besides the shot lock.

One, the only things to read were a poor copy of _The Conquest of Gaul_ and a bad translation of _The Odyssey_ , both of which Angel Eyes had already read.

Two (a), bedraggled Legionnaires kept dragging themselves out of the Colorado and crawling up to the safehouse, where they had to be put down.

Two (b), there really wasn’t a good place to dispose of the bodies that were

               i) out of line of sight of the safehouse

               ii) out of the ghoul-creating high-rad pockets of the old testing grounds at their    back and Searchlight to their west.

Three, the brief relief offered by the Second Battle of Hoover Dam had settled back into a bone-deep foreboding.

Four, Blondie’s mood had worsened exponentially.  

Five, there was only one functional bed.

Sharing a bed with another fully grown man was less than ideal.

Angel Eyes cleverly sidestepped this awkward problem entirely on the first night by saying something flippant about how warm bodies were all the same, and turning over and ignoring Blondie.

He was startled awake in the middle of the night by light scrabbling, and Blondie leaned over him to absolutely explode a radroach before he properly woke up.

“Hard to feel guilty about killing something for disturbing a man’s sleep.” in a delicious sleep-heavy rumble.

“Mmm, you’re gonna carry that weight.” was Angel Eye’s sardonic response before he carefully set the Remington back down on top of their one ammo case/nightstand.

* * *

A month after the Dam, they’d settled into an uneasy routine.

Sometimes, it seemed like Six had killed half the things in the Mojave on her vengeful sweep north and west, and had only left pockets of fun along the river for other people to enjoy.

Most of the Legion stragglers were gone in the first week, and they turned their attention to ghouls. They’d somehow managed to worsen the feral ghoul problem around themselves, but whether they were drawing out more of the walking dead from deeper within the testing grounds with the piles of dead Legion or actually creating more from the piles of dead Legion was hard to say.

On the way back from the river in the cool twilight, they’d argue about who got what kill, updating their tallies.

Angel kept waking up to Blondie’s terrible breath on his neck or his forehead and kept not hating it. He didn’t have the words to say that it’d been a while since he’d trusted anyone, he’d never had someone at his back without plans to immediately get rid of them as a liability, this was somehow different that then very stressful day trips she kept sending them on and it started to open up a future where the desert didn’t leach everything from his bones. He didn’t have the words to say this in Latin _or_ English _or_ Spanish, so he didn’t.

Over the course of the first three days, Blondie methodically burned every scrap of Legion material in the safehouse.

“Not going to cart it back and sell it?” inquired Angel, watching sets of leather armor start to catch fire.

“Trying to beef up your retirement fund, old man? I’ve got enough trophies.” and he watched another crude pot-metal insignia melt into nothing.

He even carefully, patiently burned off the painted rampant Bull on the door. Angel didn’t understand how he’d gotten so bored he resorted to that but helped anyway, setting up a series of torches and handing Blondie new ones.

Once he was done with that long, mindless task, Blondie got angrier, mood deadly still with occasional flashes of temper.

Now in the evenings, without anything left of the Legion to burn, Angel would tsk over the poorly copied _Conquest_ while Blondie did his number squares. Frowning over the faded newsprint and the uncertain hand of the old lady who made them at the 188, until one night near the end of the second week he chucked the whole bundle into the fire with a snarl.

Angel Eyes looked up with a stinging rebuke about the link between patience and intelligence at the ready, but Blondie growled “Old lady fucked it up. It’s unsolvable.”

And Angel found he had only a hollow response to that, and additionally found himself sneaking glances over the top of the worn hardcover notebook at Blondie, moodily staring into the embers of their little fire. It was a good look on him, he reflected. Highlighted his cheekbones, flattered the crows-feet around his eyes.

Blondie was too busy having an existential crisis to pay any attention to the minor crisis happening across the fire from him.

 

* * *

The last time he’d noticed Blondie as relaxed as he ever got, all gin and platonic, was back at the Lucky 38. When they'd been safe and everything had been easy, three days before the Dam, after Six had gone off with ED-E to do a “last-minute errand”. Everyone, even Lily, was jammed into the big kitchen of the Presidential Suite in such a way that nobody had a back to the door, watching Cass and Angel and Blondie pretend not to cheat at Caravan while the rest of them had played a very loose version of Truth or Falsehood in between rampant gossip.

“Have you ever killed a Deathclaw?” Raul asked Lily, who cheerfully said something about oh no she simply asked them to move out of the way for her dear grandchildren.

“What kind of Mojave are you living in where you haven’t killed a Deathclaw.” mumbled Blondie into a glass.

“Exactly! I’ve killed sixty-nine.” said Christine, smugly nestling back into Veronica’s lap.

Veronica seemed to be having some trouble breathing. Christine helped her with some mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

“What do you think Mr New Vegas looks like?” from Boone to Raul.

“I know. But he asked me not to tell.” came the unexpected answer

While the rest of the table was trying to come to grips with that, Raul asked “How did you two meet Six?” from the floor, scratching Rex around his braincase with one hand and waving toward the table with an unlabelled bottle.

“House hired us separately to track her, early on. Left the Mojave twice and we couldn’t follow. Didn’t think she’d get weirder if that’s what you’re asking.” Blondie replied for both of them.

“Did you think she would get _less weird_?” Angel asked incredulously.

“I think you’re undervaluing that solid gold hair, and I’m not just saying that as a blond myself,” Arcade protested from over Cass’ shoulder.

Gesturing wildly with his flask, he continued “When someone with _that face_ works with his gun instead of at the Gomorrah, you may be sure of two things. One, is that he’s fast on the trigger! and two, that he’s intelligent.”

Blondie leaned back properly into the kitchen chair, nudging Rex aside so he could stretch out his legs.

“Angel’s never tried to collect on that bet, but I won’t hold it against him. We should be kind to the elderly.” he fired back, and Raul roared in laughter as Cass aspirated what was left of her moonshine.

“Like everything else in this city, it’s all House’s fault. We washed our hands of it the second time she vanished and we came back here to pick up our final payment and explain ourselves. It’s only _gotten weirder_ since then.” before Angel Eyes could snipe back.

And then everyone started telling about how _they_ met her, the busiest little woman in the Mojave, as Raul and Blondie grinned and matched each other shot for shot.

What Angel Eyes didn’t care to mention to set the record straight about that evening in New Vegas six months ago, was drifting in on the tail of Blondie’s peripheral vision to keep him on his toes the whole silent way into the dead grande dame of a hotel. The man was almost too easy to keep off-balance, a barbed verbal nudge here, some sardonic sniping there, an insult whenever Angel Eyes started feeling too comfortable.

What Angel Eyes didn’t mention was when the same tiny woman he thought was dead, dripping in blood, popped out of a concealed service hatch, Angel Eyes emptied his holdout pistol into the hatch out of pure reflex.

What Angel Eyes didn’t mention was the flippant “Oh, it’s you two,” from behind her hatch-cover shield, trying to get some of the blood and viscera off her face.

What Angel Eyes didn’t mention was the thing that made him sure she wasn’t a ghost, when she started hawking like a caravan guard to clear her throat, leaving an arterial stain on the horrible carpet.

What he didn’t mention was her artificially bright “House is dead. You work for me now. Know anything about elevators? My robot dog won’t go down the stairs.”

And then she came back to her entourage in the kitchen with new allies and a new vest and did the impossible- united the Mojave against the neo-Roman Legion with its army of slaves.

And then she used two armies against a third- the New California Republic and House’s robot Securitrons to kill the Legion, and slaughtered Caesar and his top generals with her own hands.  

Blondie and he hadn’t been on the front lines- she’d posted them along the Dam’s defense towers with Boone and Christine, keeping the general scrum away from her as she crushed the Legion brass, blowing away their honorary guards like they were weeds.

She declared their weird little corner of the desert independent, threw General Oliver off Hoover Dam to make a point, and kicked out the remnants of the NCR.

Only then did she collapse, after assigning the more diplomatic girlfriend to start turning New Vegas into a functioning self-governing society.

Woman had her priorities in order.

 

Angel woke up by the fire with Blondie’s poncho over him and the man already in bed.

* * *

 

Angel liked things as tidy and orderly and neat as he could get them in this alkali hellscape, and this promised to be very messy indeed.

Like now, as Blondie was pulling cactus spines out of Angel’s shoulder where he’d slipped down a ravine in a running gunfight with a Legion praetorian who refused to believe he was a dead man walking.

He felt the pliers trace one deep scar.

“Nothing left to pull out of that one,” he sighed, eyes still closed, head on the table and two beers in.

“Who missed?”

Angel snorted. “A sleipner, twitchy little mare who didn’t want to be shoed. Too many legs and not enough people to keep- fucking JESUS,” he hissed, jerking upright as Blondie stared him dead in the eye and poured vodka over the punctures.

“Blondie is still fine. You WANT gangrene, that’ll be extra. So’s I can afford to outrun Six when you die.”

“I _am_ the more valuable and experienced gunslinger out of the two of us.”

Blondie snorted right back. “How many years you got left in you? I’ll only appreciate in value.”

Angel Eyes deflated back onto the table and mumbled something about jumped-up young pups, and let Blondie wrap him up in clean bandages with very few stains on them.

He cut his losses and went to bed early, leaving him to keep watch over the scrubby hill and the shimmering flat-baked desert beyond.

He woke up when Blondie’s arm wrapped around his waist in the night, but decided not to aggravate his shoulder by shoving him off.

The next afternoon, they were standing at the edge of the canyon over the trucker crash, pointedly bickering about just how long it took exactly for someone to turn into a ghoul, and if feral ghouls only happened after the person was dead, and if anyone ever woke up from death as a ghoul and went on living a regular peaceful life, when the Geiger on Blondie’s wrist slammed into its max detecting capability and they whirled together, putting down an ghoul glowing pale foxfire with radioactivity.

They had a sharper argument about who got to claim that one and if with was worth more than a common or garden ghoul.

Blondie wasn’t a fidgeter, but the set of his shoulders hadn’t eased all since then.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The chapter title is actually from BioShock and not Fallout, but I think I'm funny so it stays.  
> Angel Eyes being obsessed with Latin is from sybilus and deepandlovelydark ‘s fics, and I like it a lot bc I think it fits his mocking but pretentious about it ass.  
> "You're gonna carry that weight," is from Cowboy Bebop, because boy howdy do I love me some pining cowboys between that and Fallout and GBU and Trigun and I'm certain I'm forgetting something.  
> Look I know and you know that the “six is the perfect number” line from The Good The Bad and The Ugly is about the number of bullets one can load into a regular common or garden pistol, but it’s also a mathematically perfect number. And I think him doing sudoku and Angel reading around a campire (or campfire vampire) is a nice visual.  
> Clint Eastwood is an upsettingly beautiful man, which makes me feel morally compromised bc according to most accounts he's a Republican and kind of a shitty guy. I don't actually know anything about Lee Van Cleef and I think it's going to stay that way.  
> HEY did you know Mr New Vegas is a robot??? because I did NOT until I was fact-checking for this fic.  
> Sleipners belong to tumblr user owligator they're awful beasts and I love them. http://owligator.tumblr.com/post/171877885300/if-theres-one-thing-i-crave-whenever-i-play-new


	3. Well Rested Bonus (+10% XP)

They both welcomed ED-E burbling up with a message the next hazy twilight.

Six wanted them in New Vegas yesterday.

“The fuck have you been, ya dumb robot?” Blondie snapped.

ED-E dipped out of his reach and shot back over the wastes with a triumphant trill.

His partner hadn’t said a dozen words since they left the safehouse, but Blondie’s shoulders came down from around his ears a little bit more with every mile north until they were at the Freeside gates and he was back to pretending not to care about anything.

Six looked up from a little cluster of two mules and a big mutant two-headed cow.

“Oh good! You’re both here! Alive! I need you to dogsit.”

“I have a thing to go do. Sara needs mules.” she said evasively, without further explaining who Sara was or why she needed mules or why the The Courier needed to personally deliver them, and hoisted a case of plasma rounds onto the spectacularly ugly Brahmin.

“What would happen if I have a thing to go do?” asked Blondie.

She stepped up onto the Brahmin’s rigging and draped herself halfway over the plasma rounds in order to frown up at him more effectively, grunting a bit when the edge dug into her ribs.

“Everyone else is off doing an actual job, I might need you when I come back, and I hate coming home to an empty house. You two are just waiting around until you run out of caps or get bored, whichever comes first. It’s not like there are any good bounties out now anyway.     

Besides, think about how much more boring and less financially stable your lives would be without me!” she pointed out, gesturing wildly in either direction, as if those were the appropriate scales of any axis.

Blondie had the good grace to look slightly embarrassed.

Angel Eyes did not.

“I only do jobs when I’m paid.”

“An admirable virtue in a man! I’m paying you in food and room and board in a luxurious Old World-style suite in the middle of the newest independent bustling metropolis close by all manner of entertainment, where you can spend all those caps you got from when I DID pay you to clear out Vault 3 again.” she ended, trying to persuade the Brahmin into a U-turn out of the main gate by leaning her entire hundred twenty pound weight against its shoulder.

“Fuck, take House’s suite if you feel like you can handle the residual greasy capitalism all over everything up there.” Victorious, she heaved the Brahmin’s main head around north and west.

“When will you be back from your mysterious mission?” asked Angel Eyes, in something closely related to a sneer. Maybe even a first cousin.

“Dunnno! Your caps for the last job are in the fridge!” she shouted from behind the slowly plodding Brahmin.

* * *

 

Angel Eyes kicked at the cover of the hidden hatch.

“You don’t have to stand on top of it every time you come through the lobby. She's not gonna pop out again.” Blondie pointed out.

“But she MIGHT,” offered Angel Eyes to the closing elevator.

He tipped a slot machine over it anyway when he was sure Blondie had arrived upstairs.

He cleared all the rooms out of habit with Rex, walking up through the sandy wreckage of the lobby all the way to the ruins of House’s playboy suite, assuming Blondie had already cleared the Presidential Suite.

The robot dog bounded out of the elevator ahead of him, weird metal toenails scrabbling on the worn carpet to make the turn into the kitchen.

Blondie was sprawled out on top of Six’s bed, fully clothed, hat over his eyes in the dark.

Like he was waiting for something.

“Man alive,” said Angel Eyes disdainfully, leaning against the doorframe. “Gomorrah is right across the street-”

One blue eye glinted out from under his hat. “Yeah, but you’re right there.”  

“Ah, you’ve found a sense of humor. If only a sense.”

“Shirt stays on.” Blondie said firmly.

And then Angel Eyes realized he hadn’t ever seen Blondie shirtless, just occasional glimpses of skin between his belt and a rucked-up shirt.

And then they kissed and he forgot about it.

And then when they proceeded beyond kissing, Blondie paused from where he knelt on the floor between Angel Eye’s legs, hands no longer pulling Angel Eyes’ chaps to his ankles and frowning.

“You were Enclave like Arcade? Or was your family just as weird about Old World customs?” he asks the circumcised dick with some surprise.

“Well, that’s a fucking boner killer,” Angel Eyes snapped, heaving to his feet and starting to step around Blondie to get enough room to pull up his pants.

Blondie stopped him with a strange glint in his eye.

“Take off my shirt.”

“ _Obscurum per obscurius_ ,” muttered Angel Eyes.

He slipped his hands slowly up that trim waist, that well-muscled lower back, to reveal a livid Legion charging bull brand across Blondie’s shoulders.

“Got born into it.” Blondie offered. “Still responsible for all the shit I did during. More so for all the shit I did after.”

Angel Eyes huffed out a laugh. “Look at us. A matched pair of miscreants, running from their pasts. History repeating, _ad nauseam, et cetera_.”

They ended up not fucking and having a weird half-dressed philosophical discussion over whiskey in the kitchen instead, Rex managing to lie on top of both pairs of boots.

* * *

 

Six slammed back into the Lucky 38 three days later, plus one bandaged forearm and minus half her vest, ignoring the men in her bed and flipping the trunk at the bottom of the bed, sending a truly alarming number of energy weapons all over the floor.

“HELLO MY LOVE,” she sang out to Rex, fending him off with the butt of the nearest plasma pistol, and he turned his affections to Veronica and Christine, greeting them like they’d been gone for years instead of days, leaving him to desperately starve alone.  

“What?” said Angel Eyes, eloquently, slightly behind Blondie and also holding a gun.

“Oh good you’re both still here- I’ll be back later- farm’s haunted.”

“WHAT,” started Blondie, beginning to put down the Colt.

Realizing who was where, she frowned up at them.

“There are thirty-seven other beds in this casino, seven of which are as big as mine or bigger. The pair of you, out of my bed and go fuck in a different one.”

“We’re not a-” 

“Why the fuck would you keep accepting increasingly difficult jobs together and go on VACATION TOGETHER if you weren’t- actually, I don’t have time for this-babe, help me with the wheel-” she said halfway in the elevator.

“Wait-” from Angel Eyes, increasingly desperate.

She kicked the <door open> button to keep yelling at them.“Oh, yeah, just two friends, sharing a bed, accepting every job the other’s on-”

“Just guys bein’ dudes,” offered Veronica,

“This is not heterosexual behavior.” from Christine, patiently.

“HEY-” Angel Eyes, affronted, reluctant to accept he was getting attached, he didn’t get ATTACHED, not just because he slipped up once and wanted a bit of creature comfort-

“FARM HAUNTED!” she shouted before the elevator doors closed, swearing when they popped back open again because a plasma cannon wasn’t all the way in.

“So it goes,” Blondie sighed, and pulled Angel Eyes back down into the big, warm bed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The timeline doesn't quite work out for Angel Eyes to be Enclave, but let's handwave that. He's certainly awful and stubborn enough to be a paramilitary organization of one, post-Enclave. Maybe he ducked out a door on the opposite side of the oil rig as Arcade and his mom were going out the other side? The circumcised dick thing is from the vintar fic Skin Deep, which made me bark out laughter on public transportation.  
> I am sorry for the lack of sex in this- maybe in the next fic they'll move beds and bone down.  
> I don’t know what errand Six is off on either. It’s not integral to the Blondeyes journey anyway. I mostly wanted to get a Two Mules for Sister Sara reference in.  
> “Ah, you’ve found a sense of humor. If only a sense.” I didn’t write these lines and I don't know where they’re originally from bc this phrase is nigh ungoogleable.  
> I know the Legion erases all tribal tattoos, but brands seem more hardcore than tats for Legion soldiers. I imagine Blondie’s didn't heal very well and it bothers him occasionally.  
> I don’t know which farm is haunted either. Maybe the one in front of the alien crash site, if you’ve got the Wild Wasteland perk? What is a alien but a type of ghost anyway?  
> Blondie would be a big fan of Vonengut.

**Author's Note:**

> they're terrible! they're awful! i love them!


End file.
